evolution of consumption.

Sec. 5. Any adequate discussion of the central issue thus presented would
fall into two parts. In the first place, before a consumption good can
come into general acceptance and currency it must have been in some way
discovered, suggested or invented, and the psychology of invention is
undoubtedly a matter of very great complexity and difficulty. But for
the purposes of the present inquiry all this may be passed over. The
other branch of a full discussion of our problem has to do with the
reception of the newly invented commodity or process into wider and
wider use--and this again is a social phenomenon not less complex than
the other. It is this phenomenon of increasing extension and vogue, of
widening propagation from person to person, that is directly of present
concern for us--and in particular the individual person's attitude
toward the new thing and the nature of the interest he takes in it.

It has recently been argued by a learned and acute investigator of
economic origins that "invention is the mother of necessity," and not
the child.[45] Such a complete reversal of all our ordinary thought
about the matter seems at first sheer paradox. What, one may ask, can
ever suggest an invention and what can give it welcome and currency but
an existing need--which, if it happens to be for the time being latent
and unconscious, needs only the presentation of its appropriate means of
satisfaction to "arouse" and "awaken" it fully into action? But this
paradox as to invention is at all events not more paradoxical than the
view as to the reception of new commodities and the rise of new desires
that has been above suggested. What it appears to imply is in principle
identical with what has seemed, from our consideration of the other
aspect of the general situation, to be the simple empirical fact;
neither the existence of the new commodity nor our interest in it when
it is presented admits of explanation as an effect on each particular
occasion of a preexisting unsatisfied desire for it. What both sides of
the problem bring to view is a certain original bent or constitutive
character of human nature--a predisposition, an _elan vital_ perhaps,
which we must recognize as nothing less than perfectly general and
comprehensive--finding expression in inventive effort and likewise in
the readiness with which the individual meets a new commodity halfway
and gives it opportunity to become for him, if it can, a